nVidia 8600 GTS and 8600 GT - Foxconn and XFX

Game Benchmarks - CoD 2, F.E.A.R. and Oblivion

Call of Duty 2 is a fairly recent game that uses a lot of DirectX 9.0c features, including real time shadows, amazing smoke effects and some nice looking HDR effects. This makes the game very taxing at these high resolutions. I played a fully patched up version of the game. Once again I played through the game with a two minute gaming session including explosions, smoke and also lots of snow.

Note that for this review I played at 1280 x 1024 with 4 x AA, all other settings were on maximum.

Let's see how the cards fared here:

With these game tests I am only using the X1950 card as a reference point here. You can see that all three cards coped pretty well with CoD 2 - a pretty demanding game even by today's standards. The XFX tops the lot here, a start of a trend.

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. is a game based on an engine that uses many features of DirectX 9.0c. It has volumetric lighting, soft shadows, parallax mapping and particle effects, with a slow-motion mode that really taxes today's top of the line GPU's. I played a fully updated game with the latest patches installed. I played three two-minute runs on a taxing part of the game with plenty of action, using slow-motion for the full time whilst firing at enemy soldiers and using grenades that produce a cool "blast" contortion effect when blown up.

The cards were played at 1280 x 1024 with 4 x AA, 4 x FSAA and soft shadows disabled. All other settings were on maximum.

The Foxconn did pretty well in F.E.A.R. here just outmatching the XFX by 1 FPS or so. I wasn't quite sure of the reason for this, but all three cards managed this game to a very good-looking level of immersion.

Oblivion

Oblivion is an awesome RPG with a simply huge immersive environment, great graphics and incredibly realistic scenery. This game is currently one of the most testing games that you can buy and it is certainly a test of the high-end cards here. I chose to do a run-through of the Arena part of the game. I spoke to a character, did some magic whilst in a fight and fought in the arena that is pretty huge. Also as well as doing this test I took a wander around to make sure that the benchmark resembled the general gameplay with each card. In-game settings used:

Oblivion was played at 1280 x 1024 with HDR enabled and no AA.

The cards are a little more predictable in Oblivion with the XFX card taking quite a lead. To me this shows that this leans more on the stream processor clock than the actual clockspeed. Still, even the 8600 GT did very well in Oblivion at this resolution and settings, very impressive.

Also included is full hardware decoding of H.264 video as well as VC-1 content. I could not test this in this review as I am using Windows XP Professional for the tests and not Vista. An XP driver bringing these capabilities is currently being developed by nVidia.

I don't know what ATI is doing but nVidia is about to eat into a big portion of their pie. If those prices equate to about $100 to $150 they really are good bang for the buck. That said, I myself wouldn't settle for less than a 8800GTS 320MB, seems like the best card out there for the money; 8600 cards do get a lot chopped off, so while the price is agreeable to the performance it may be a bit too little for a gamer to accept.

What I find interesting, pricewize, is that these cards are hitting the scene @.. well I`ve just had a quick look-see and u can get an MSI 8600 something for £90, up to an XFX XT £150.

Now each step-up in price seems to co-incide with a big of a clock step-up as standard to the cards, and around midway ~£120 - are cards that u could probably pur-chase and clock much better than the more expensive ones.

But - think again - EXPENSIVE, we`re only talking about £30.

It seems to me that market-wize they`re making these cards for a spread of purchasers that would like to say their card is `overclocked` (although straight out of the plastic, but it sounds good) ; overclockers who will buy a kinda midrange and do the rest themselves ; and of course the cheapest I can find section.

What supprizes me most tho is that on release the prices are as low as they are. AND u can see 8800s coming down... is a G90 based card that close ? or are they really trying to spank ATi ?

I bought the XFX 8600GTS standard version clocked at 675MHz and it is a big improvement for playing games in 1280x1024 compared to my previous 7800GT.

You can OC the XFX 8600GTS very easily at the same clock as the XXX version 730MHz and even push the GPU up to 775MHz (similar OC Kemp did to the XXX version in the review), thus you can save some bucks on the purchase.

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